good; but it does not, therefore, follow, as some eager innovators will have it, that Homer and Virgil are to be banished from our public schools altogether, and steam-engines and calculating machines substituted in their place. Mn yevoro!-Let it not be !-Let us not snap cruelly the golden chain that has so long and so pleasantly bound us to the past!-Let us not unbridge the mystic gulf of centuries profanely!-Let Virgil and Homer live, as good things, and among the best, for those who have time and capacity to drink deep of the Pierian spring,' that never yet gave strength to shallow bibbers. How this is to be done, we have already, we think, sufficiently indicated. Let Latin and Greek be reserved for a higher class of schools, for the gymnasia; and let none be sent to begin Latin there who is not likely seriously to carry it out in the university. This is Herr Beneke's opinion; and, however different the practice of good old England in many places may be, there can be no doubt it is a sound opinion. But we shall now hear at greater length how chivalrously our catholic-hearted educationist champions those very classics in the gymnasia, which in the Bürger schools he had so decidedly condemned. "As to what they urge against the ancient languages, in the first place, that they are too far removed from our modern habits of thought, too strange, to interest or to edify us, I must be allowed to say, without meaning to say any thing paradoxical, that this very strangeness is precisely the thing that ought to invite our familiarity. For, while the classical student works himself sympathetically into the sentiments and manner of expression of the ancient world, he by this very act necessarily receives a mental expansion and a breadth of view that the study of no modern languages could have conferred; for in these last both the modes of thought and the matter coincide so much with our own that for the purpose of supplementing our intellectual deficiencies, they must ever be comparatively feeble. Besides, this greater contrast between the ancient habits of thought and the modern has a strong virtue to stir the interest, and to fix the attention; an ancient author, even where he is only second or third rate, is infinitely more suggestive than a modern, merely because he is ancient; it is by the strong power of contrast that we most readily learn to compare : and in the habit of extended comparison and faithful deduction the art of philosophising consists. "In the second place: if it be a more difficult task to attain an available knowledge of the ancient languages than of the modern, this difficulty also is an advantage. It has been and is the most perverse of all methods of proceeding in education, to think only how we may make all instruction as easy as possible for the learner. Knowledge of any kind can be easily taken up and appropriated only in proportion as it is superficial. When the time for instruction commences, the time for play is over the time for intellectual exertion is come; and it is the business A Defence of Classical Studies. 139 of the teacher so to select and apportion the objects of teaching that they may afford a course of gymnastics to the learner. Instead, therefore, of inventing methods to make study easy, some talk might be expected to be made of the best art of inventing difficulties. Now there are few studies that present such a complete course of intellectual gymnastics as the study of ancient literature. We do not speak here of the mere external elements of ancient literature-the lexicographical and grammatical frame-work—all this we most willingly give up to the objector, as by no means peculiarly fitted either to expand or to strengthen the mind; and the more such merely mechanical processes, can be facilitated and accelerated, the better. But the sacrifice which we make in mastering the mere externals of ancient learning, is more than compensated by the developing power which they possess in so eminent a degree when duly followed out. Those compositions which can be had without any great demands on our intellectual activity, flit across our minds superficially, leaving scarcely a trace behind. Take, for example, any historical or poetical work in our mother tongue or in any modern language. Spurred on by an interest in the subject we drive rapidly forward from one point of prominence to another; but this very celerity of progress, which is so pleasant, prevents us from thoroughly grasping and detaining the characters and events as they pass before us; at the end of our movement there remains but an imperfect shadowy outline of what we have read and in a short time even this shadowy outline vanishes. The same thing happens with the mere style and manner of expression. We may pause, perhaps, for a moment over this and the other passage peculiarly pointed and impressive; but in general we are in too great a hurry to receive any distinct impression from the beauties of style; or will not dwell on a passage long enough to know in what its rhetorical excellence consists. And if this be so with grown up men, how much more must it be the case with young persons whose minds are so disposed to triviality and dissipation. It is the duty of the teacher, therefore, rather to put a drag on the light and rattling spirits of youth than to pioneer the road too smoothly before them. Now this salutary drag on the precipitancy of youthful minds is exactly what the ancient languages are so well calculated to supply. While the scholar is laboriously employed in constructing piecemeal a historical, poetical, or rhetorical whole, from the biographies of a Plutarch, the tragedies of a Sophocles, or the orations of a Demosthenes, he is forced to expend as much intellectual strength on a single elementary trait as he does on a whole work in the mother tongue, or on a whole comparison in any modern tongue; and in this way both the matter and the manner of the thing read are appropriated and assimilated in a way most conducive to a healthy reproduction on the part of the receiver, and to a free development of the higher powers of reflection on the phenomena of the intellectual world. "But it is not only that ancient literature by power of contrast is more suggestive to us moderns; there is, at the same time, a simplicity of character both in the thoughts and in the manner of expression of the ancients that is more readily appreciable by the youthful mind than the more complex relations of our modern development. The works of the ancients, are a mirror of the childhood and boyhood of humanity: our children and boys now understand these works by a natural sympathy, better than our men. There is too much reflection and philosophising of all kinds in modern literature for the juvenile taste; there is something more elementary and immediate, more fresh, and, as it were, transparent among the ancients. The ancient world also presents something more self-contained, less straggling and involved than the moderns. If the approach to the view be, as we have admitted, more laborious, the objects, when they fairly start out from the mist, are more tangible and more comprehensible. "This holds true of ancient literature in a triple sense: it is true of the grammatical combinations in the first place (compare Herodotus, for instance, in this respect, with Hume or Gibbon); it is no less true of the forms which art assumed in the hands of antiquity; the ancient Epos, the ancient tragedy, and the ancient eloquence and philosophy, are nearer to the mind of young persons in modern times than works of the same class in our own tongue; and it is true, finally, of the matter of the classics as well as of their style, of the characters of the various relations of life, social and political. The distance in point of time between an ancient and a modern is more than compensated to the young mind by the proximity in point of tone, and sentiment, and character. Ancient history, for example, how infinitely more simple than the modern! it is more the history in fact of individual men, or of separate groups and masses of men easily distinguishable; and the relations that occur between them are at the same time comparatively simple; the passions and the motives also of the historical characters (think only of the patriarchs in the book of Genesis, or the leaders in the Trojan war), are simpler and more kindred to the habits of thought and feeling that characterise young persons. Modern history, on the other hand, the nearer it comes to the young student in point of time, the farther it recedes from him in point of affinity; its complicated relations, its strange disguises, its state plots and counterplots, and diplomatic intrigues, may be made to envelop the youthful mind, but they can never mould it. In whatever light, therefore, we view the matter, ancient literature, when the scholar fairly enters into the spirit of it, affords a much more congenial nourishment for young minds than modern. "It is to be observed, moreover, that this bond of connection which attaches us to the ancient mind, is not one of psychological relationship merely; it is essentially also an historical tie. Our whole modern culture is what it is in a great measure as a growth from the fertile soil of antiquity, and continues still to draw no inconsiderable part of its nourishment from the same source. As the modern languages can be grammatically comprehended only through the medium of the Latin out of which they sprung; so in tracing back the various branch streams of modern intellect we arrive, from whatever point we may have set out, always at the same two fresh fountains of Greece and Rome; so that if a man will not be content to receive traditionally, and by a blind in A Defence of Classical Studies. 141 stinct, but strives with a full consciousness and a sympathetic reproduction to understand the modern mind, he can do so in no way at once so speedily and so thoroughly, as by beginning with the ancient. The food, which whether we will or no, we must receive from the ancients with shut eyes, a classical education enables us to adopt and to enjoy with open vision. "Whatever truth there may be in these representations is independent altogether, it will be observed, of any mere external elegance and polish that may belong to the remains of ancient literature handed down to us. The advantages of which we have been talking result from the essential character of ancient works, in thought, and emotion, and expression: these advantages belong to them as products of the ancient mind, not as models of what is finished and satisfying in works of art. But when we consider further, that in addition to the simplicity and tangibility of their contents, and their less complex character generally, the works of the ancients stand unrivalled as models of chasteness and truth in art, we find ourselves provided with another and a most salutary check against that looseness, ill-regulated luxuriance, and extravagance, by which the compositions of modern literature have too frequently been characterised. There is another matter, also, of no small importance in estimating the influence which the pattern specimens of ancient literature exert on the modern mind; on account of the different situation in which we are placed, and the different circumstances by which we are surrounded, there is much less danger of a slavish and passive imitation of antiquity, than there is in the case of a modern model. An ancient model will be admired, and exercise a beneficial influence on the taste of those who admire it; but as it does not excite, and is not meant to excite to any imitation of exactly the same kind, it seems to stimulate exertion without inciting a discouraging comparison. The classic models of our own literature, on the other hand, stand so near to us, and so obviously incite comparison with our own performances, that a servile imitation, or a despairful abandonment of self-development, is too apt to be the result of the early admiration which is fixed on them. "To meet these views, many persons interested in the education of youth have proposed, that instead of the classical languages the old German should be used in our higher schools. In our early Teutonic literature, it is alleged, we have a contrast to the modern development of the German mind, sufficiently strong to stimulate the reflective faculty, and at the same time an extension of the view beyond the narrowness of the present horizon. But to this proposal there are two obvious objections. Our old German literature, in the first place, though different in several accessory modifications, is, in its fundamental ideas, the same as the modern. The contrast, therefore, is not sufficiently marked and decided for the purpose. In the second place, even supposing the fundamental ideas of our old German poetry were every thing that could be desired in this respect, the forms of art in which they have been handed down to us, are any thing but models. As in every other point of human culture, so in literary development, the progress of the northern It was not till after nations was at first exceedingly slow and painful. they had appropriated and worked up the early ripe literature of the southern nations that they began to exert their independent energies in a more vigorous form, and to create works in some respects superior to the models by, which they had originally been stimulated. In consequence of this difference of historical development, it is altogether impossible for us Germans to go back to the sources of our civilisation with the same intellectual benefit that the Greeks did to theirs, or that even we ourselves can go to the civilisation of the Greeks; much less can young persons grow up healthily in an environment that is full of waste places and monstrosities even for full grown men. "But, continue the advocates of the old German education, do we not historically grow out of German ground—are we not GERMANS— and shall we be at home at Rome, and at Athens, and everywhereonly not amongst ourselves?-Here also there is a fallacy. What we are as a literary people, we are in a much greater degree through the influence of the Greeks and Romans, and more lately of the English and the French, than through the continued working of our own most ancient national literature. Nay, it has been experimentally manifested (as it was supereminently in the late war of liberation in 1813) that as often as an attempt has been made to bring old Germanism into the foreground of our modern culture, so often (after a little artificial parading) has it been thrown aside. People, however patriotic, had such an instinctive, if not always conscious, feeling of the inferiority of these northern productions to those of the south and east, that, in spite of all patriotic trumpeting and blowing up, the Niebelungen was forced in a few years to leave the Iliad and the Odyssey in quiet possession of the academic ground. We do not pretend to decide which course of development is the preferable for a people, a development thoroughly and entirely national, or a complex growth springing from varied foreign impregnation; but Providence has so ordered it that the development of the German people should be in this latter fashion decidedly: and with this, as an arrangement of Providence, beyond the hope of human change, we must ever be content. "We conclude, therefore, on a review of the whole matter, that for him who wishes to plant himself upon the highest position of intellectual cultivation, an initiation into ancient literature is absolutely indispensable. Only when so initiated is he in a condition to survey comprehensively, to contemplate clearly, and to see profoundly into what human nature under its various aspects can achieve; by the aid of ancient learning alone is the educator enabled to extend his view beyond the narrow horizon of the Now which encompasses him, and to distinguish between that which is merely local or temporary, and that which is of universal and human significancy. And this extent of vision alone, it unquestionably is that entitles a man to say, that he is educated in the highest and complete sense of that word." We have patiently followed our author through this long defence of classical education, because, hackneyed as the theme may |